Saturday, June 30, 2012

Eric Berkowitz is a writer, lawyer and journalist. He has a degree in print journalism from University of Southern California and has published in The Los Angeles Times and The Los Angeles Weekly, and for the Associated Press.

...[L]et’s start with The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oscar Wilde’s trial is also the point where you chose to end your own book.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is now a part of the canon that no one would admit to not having read. Most of us have read it and delighted in its witticisms. It’s hard to imagine, but when Dorian Gray was first published, the book was not well received at all. It was totally panned. It was held against him as being an example of an effete character. It was being serialised by Lippincott’s Magazine, and the serialisation of the novel stopped when it became too inflammatory.

One of the reasons why I wanted to recommend this book is that it is an example of literature being used as evidence itself. Most of us know the bones of the situation of Oscar Wilde being put on trial in 1895 – the father of his [homosexual] lover became inflamed and found all kinds of characters to use against him [in court]. During his trial, Oscar Wilde had to answer for the attitudes expressed by the characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

We need to stop and think about that. There was a brilliant cross-examination rendered against him. In court, the lawyer who took him on was remarkably talented. He essentially said to Oscar Wilde: “Do you hold these views? Is this your belief?” Oscar Wilde was quite brilliant, but not brilliant enough to see what was being done to him. He very aggressively adopted the views, thereby admitting his proclivities and then having to answer for the fact that in England, at that time, private sexual activity between men was punishable by two years of hard labour.

The key point about Dorian Gray is whether a writer must answer for the thoughts and ideas of the characters that he writes. And in this case, he did. It worked very much against him. I wonder whether writers today – who write about murder, perversion and all of the terrible things that populate books and television – should ever be called to task for the thoughts and ideas expressed in their work. Most of us would say that should never happen. There’s a very large difference between the composer and that which is composed.

If Park Lane is made into a movie, I'd love to see strong, almost dark characters. Gemma Arterton would be great as Grace, the maid new to the job and trying her best as she is forced to weave an ever thicker web of lies around her. Natalie...[read on]

Osborne was born in London and studied philosophy and modern languages at Oxford University. Her other books include Lilla’s Feast and The Bolter, a San Francisco Chronicle's Book of the Year and No.1 bestseller in the UK.

So begins Isabella’s story, in this evocative, vividly imagined novel about one of history’s most famous and controversial queens—the warrior who united a fractured country, the champion of the faith whose reign gave rise to the Inquisition, and the visionary who sent Columbus to discover a New World. Acclaimed author C. W. Gortner envisages the turbulent early years of a woman whose mythic rise to power would go on to transform a monarchy, a nation, and the world.

Young Isabella is barely a teenager when she and her brother are taken from their mother’s home to live under the watchful eye of their half-brother, King Enrique, and his sultry, conniving queen. There, Isabella is thrust into danger when she becomes an unwitting pawn in a plot to dethrone Enrique. Suspected of treason and held captive, she treads a perilous path, torn between loyalties, until at age seventeen she suddenly finds herself heiress of Castile, the largest kingdom in Spain. Plunged into a deadly conflict to secure her crown, she is determined to wed the one man she loves yet who is forbidden to her—Fernando, prince of Aragon.

As they unite their two realms under “one crown, one country, one faith,” Isabella and Fernando face an impoverished Spain beset by enemies. With the future of her throne at stake, Isabella resists the zealous demands of the inquisitor Torquemada even as she is seduced by the dreams of an enigmatic navigator named Columbus. But when the Moors of the southern domain of Granada declare war, a violent, treacherous battle against an ancient adversary erupts, one that will test all of Isabella’s resolve, her courage, and her tenacious belief in her destiny.

From the glorious palaces of Segovia to the battlefields of Granada and the intrigue-laden gardens of Seville, The Queen’s Vow sweeps us into the tumultuous forging of a nation and the complex, fascinating heart of the woman who overcame all odds to become Isabella of Castile.

Friday, June 29, 2012

Most Francis yarns feature horse racing, of course. The ex-jockey's first novel was this sardonically entitled thriller, with a jockey-hero who realises that a horse against which he was racing (at Maidenhead) is put at a disadvantage when the champion jockey who is riding it is murdered before the winning post. He must turn detective.

I have just finished reading a couple of books that may, superficially, seem very different, but which hold in common salutary warnings for the future of our race as we rush headlong towards a maelstrom of climate chaos and resource depletion and the tearing apart of our cosy, comfortable, world. In the first part of his ‘The Century’ trilogy, Fall of Giants, Ken Follett immerses us brilliantly in the horrors of the First World War and highlights the sabre-rattling, intransigence and sheer lunacy of the political machinations that led to its onset. Looking forward rather than back – and needing no introduction, Suzanne Collins – in The Hunger Games - excels at building a dystopian, post-apocalyptic world of totalitarian government, repression, and televised child-on-child violence that is often visceral and which must – at times – shock the young adults at whom it is primarily aimed. As a geologist and climate scientist with an informed dread about what the future will hold for my – and everyone’s – children and grandchildren, both books...[read on]

An astonishing transformation over the last 20,000 years has seen our planet changed from a frigid wasteland into the temperate world within which our civilization has grown and thrived. This dynamic episode in our planet's history, right at the close of the Ice Age, saw not only a huge temperature hike but also the Earth's crust bouncing and bending in response to the melting of the great ice sheets and the filling of the ocean basins--dramatic geophysical events that triggered earthquakes, spawned tsunamis, and provoked a series of eruptions from the world's volcanoes. In Waking the Giant, Bill McGuire argues that now that human activities are driving climate change as rapidly as anything seen in post-glacial times, the sleeping giant beneath our feet is stirring once again. When and if it finally wakes, we should all be afraid--very afraid. Could we be leaving our children not only a far hotter world, but a more geologically unstable one too?

Established in 221 BCE, the Chinese empire lasted for 2,132 years before being replaced by the Republic of China in 1912. During its two millennia, the empire endured internal wars, foreign incursions, alien occupations, and devastating rebellions--yet fundamental institutional, sociopolitical, and cultural features of the empire remained intact. The Everlasting Empire traces the roots of the Chinese empire's exceptional longevity and unparalleled political durability, and shows how lessons from the imperial past are relevant for China today.

Yuri Pines demonstrates that the empire survived and adjusted to a variety of domestic and external challenges through a peculiar combination of rigid ideological premises and their flexible implementation. The empire's major political actors and neighbors shared its fundamental ideological principles, such as unity under a single monarch--hence, even the empire's strongest domestic and foreign foes adopted the system of imperial rule. Yet details of this rule were constantly negotiated and adjusted. Pines shows how deep tensions between political actors including the emperor, the literati, local elites, and rebellious commoners actually enabled the empire's basic institutional framework to remain critically vital and adaptable to ever-changing sociopolitical circumstances. As contemporary China moves toward a new period of prosperity and power in the twenty-first century, Pines argues that the legacy of the empire may become an increasingly important force in shaping the nation's future trajectory.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Graham Joyce, a winner of the O. Henry Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award, lives in Leicester, England, with his family. His books include The Silent Land, Smoking Poppy, Indigo (a New York Times Notable Book of 2000), The Tooth Fairy (a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998), and Requiem, among others. His new novel is Some Kind of Fairy Tale.

Stuffed with marvels. Byatt doesn't re-tell fairytales, she creates her own and endows them with intelligent intention and original power. The heroine of the title story, Dr Gillian Perholt, is a scholar and a decoder of stories, and the narrative nests inside that detail. But it's not all cerebral fun. This story has a very large genie endowed with impressive and stinky genitals.

I love this question because it’s so fun to play with! Readers email me all the time with suggestions and so many of them are great possibilities I never even thought of.

I have an image of Sally Sin, the main character of the Sin series, in my head but it doesn’t line up nicely with any current Hollywood actors of the appropriate age. And my primary bad guy, Ian Blackford, is a mishmash of all my favorite movie villains over the years with a layer of Pierce...[read on]

Welcome back to Threadville, Pennsylvania, where crafts are king, and a “killer” sewing machine lives up to its name…

Darlene Coddlefield, the winner of a national sewing competition, has come to Willow Vanderling’s embroidery shop, In Stitches, to be presented with a top-of-the-line Chandler Champion sewing and embroidery machine as her prize. But Darlene’s triumph is short-lived after she’s found dead under her sewing table, apparently crushed by the heavy machine.

It soon becomes clear that this was no freak accident. Who had it in for Darlene Coddlefield? The long string of suspects includes Darlene’s fire chief husband. So Willow and her best friend, Haylee, become volunteer firefighters to uncover the truth. But when a second sewing machine sparks trouble, the friends realize they may have jumped from the frying pan into the fire…

From human trafficking to the smuggling of small arms to the looting of antiquities, illicit trade poses significant threats to international order. So why is it so difficult to establish international cooperation against illicit trade? Governing Guns, Preventing Plunder offers a novel, thought-provoking answer to this crucial question.

Conventional wisdom holds that criminal groups are the biggest obstacle to efforts to suppress illicit trade. Contrarily, Asif Efrat explains how legitimate actors, such as museums that acquire looted antiquities, seek to hinder these regulatory efforts. Yet such attempts to evade regulation fuel international political conflicts between governments demanding action against illicit trade and others that are reluctant to cooperate. The book offers a framework for understanding the domestic origins of these conflicts and how the distribution of power shapes their outcome. Through this framework, Efrat explains why the interests of governments vary across countries, trades, and time. In a fascinating empirical analysis, he solves a variety of puzzles: Why is the international regulation of small arms much weaker than international drug control? What led the United States and Britain to oppose the efforts against the plunder of antiquities, and why did they ultimately join these efforts? How did American pressure motivate Israel to tackle sex trafficking? Efrat's findings will change the way we think about illicit trade, offering valuable insights to scholars, activists, and policymakers.

Jasper Fforde has been writing in the comedy/fantasy genre since 2001 when his novel The Eyre Affair debuted on the New York Times bestseller list. Since then he has published more books, several of them bestsellers, and counts his sales in millions. He lives and works in Wales.

This story by the American writer/illustrator is quite rightly viewed as a classic across the pond, along with her other tour de force, Mike Mulligan's Steam Shovel, but is little known over here [in the UK]. This has been a Fforde bedtime staple for over four decades, and has never failed to delight. Children like the same stories quite often, night after night, and the simple story of a little house living on a small hill surrounded by apple trees, does get asked for quite a lot. We like this book because it graphically illustrates the passage of time, and views the same place through the seasons, then with the march of technology and the encroachment of urbanisation – and the loss of simple things, like not being able to see the stars because of the glow from street-lamps. A childhood is incomplete without at least one reading.

Recently, I re-read one of my favourite books, Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour, with enormous pleasure and renewed admiration for her skills as a novelist.

When I first discovered Molly Keane a few years ago, it was almost like discovering a hilarious, deliciously spiteful and observant new friend. Her humor is so sly, her characterizations merciless- she is sort of like an adult Roald Dahl at times, , but she is also a poet at heart. Few writers I know can evoke the agonies of snobbery or a broken heart, or the atmosphere, the smell, the character of a room as she can, or the beauty of the Irish countryside at dawn.

Good Behaviour tells the story of Aroon, a character every bit as monstrous as Roald Dahl’s Mrs Trunchbull. She is a snob, a control freak; she has lots of rules about things like sherry (there’s posh sherry, and other peoples) and napkins and the laying out of the dead.

Aroon is a sad character too: she is a 57 year old spinster living with a cold mother who has bullied her all her life.

FROM THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF EAST OF THE SUN, A POWERFUL LOVE STORY SET AGAINST THE UNSTABLE AND EXOTIC CITIES OF CAIRO AND ISTANBUL DURING THE HEIGHT OF WORLD WAR II

At twenty-three, Saba Tarcan knows her only hope of escaping the clamor of Cardiff Bay, Wales, lies in her voice. While traveling Britain, singing for wounded soldiers, Saba meets handsome fighter pilot Dom Benson, recovering from burns after a crash. When Saba auditions to entertain troops in far-off lands, Dom follows her to London. Just as their relationship begins to take root, Saba is sent to sing in Africa, and Dom is assigned a new mission in the Middle East. As Saba explores Cairo’s bazaars, finding friendship among the troupe’s acrobats and dancers, Dom returns to the cockpit once again, both thrilled and terrified to be flying above the desert floor. In spite of great danger, the two resolve to reunite.

When Saba learns that her position makes her uniquely qualified for a secret mission of international importance, she agrees to help the British Secret Service, concealing her role from Dom. Her decision will jeopardize not only her safety but also the love of her life.

Based on true accounts of female entertainers used as spies during World War II, Jasmine Nights is a powerful story of danger, secrets, and love, filled with the colors and sounds of the Middle East’s most beautiful cities.

One of the most exciting and brilliant books about childhood ever written. I have no children, I'm 63 years old, and every time I read this book, I get the feeling that the endless perils of my endless childhood will inevitably lead to a place in the road where I will be victorious.

The challenge of casting the four generations of the Copeland family, I think, is finding actors who can show us exactly what they’re thinking without doing much ‘acting’ at all. In many ways, though each of the characters has their own issue that they’re dealing with, their conflicts are very much internal, and often this is dealt with in the narrative. So in a perfect world, the actors in the movie of my book will be so brilliant that when they turn their heads a sixteenth of an inch, or blink their eyes almost imperceptibly, the viewer will intuit my exact words from the novel without need of a voice over or any other explanation. I think it could happen.

Thusly, my dream cast:

Philip Seymour Hoffman or Robert Sean Leonard in the role of Gordon, the middle-aged father. Gordon is physically, kind of a stiff, described in the book as attractive in a “small market weatherman” kind of way. He’s also a bit of a know-it-all and at the moment he’s worried that he’s losing his mind.

Catherine Keener or Lili Taylor would be perfect for Jean, Gordon’s wife. Jean is silently suffering the loss of a lover her husband had not known about. There’s also an actress named Amy...[read on]

They made a television movie of this recently which I thought was good but the book, about suffering during the First World War, is marvellous. It’s very accurate and brings that period to life. It really struck a chord.

The story of a group of Kenyan farmers working to transcend lives of dire poverty and hunger illuminates the challenges, and vital necessity, of transforming Africa's agriculture sector

Africa's small farmers, who comprise two-thirds of its population, toil in a time warp, living and working essentially as they did in the 1930s. Without mechanized equipment, fertilizer, or irrigation; using primitive storage facilities, roads, and markets; lacking capital, credit, and insurance; they harvest only one-quarter the yields of Western farmers, half of which spoil before getting to market. But in 2011 one group of farmers in Kenya came together to try to change their odds for success—and their families' futures. Roger Thurow spent a year following their progress.

In The Last Hunger Season, the intimate dramas of the farmers' lives unfold amidst growing awareness that to feed the world's growing population, food production must double by 2050. How will the farmers, Africa, and a hungrier world deal with issues of water usage, land ownership, foreign investment, corruption, GMO's, the changing role of women, and the politics of foreign aid?

Roger Thurow is a senior fellow for global agriculture and food policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. His first book, Enough: Why the World's Poorest Still Starve in an Age of Plenty, written with Scott Kilman, won the Harry Chapin Why Hunger book award and was a finalist for both the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award.

Lyndon B. Johnson is President, Beatlemania is in overdrive and gasoline costs 30 cents a gallon when Ned Parker retires as constable in Center Springs, Texas. But his plan to live a quiet life as a cotton farmer is torpedoed. A phone call leads Ned to a body in the Red River and into the urgent investigation headed by his nephew, the newly elected constable Cody Parker. Together they work to head off a multi-state killing spree that sets northeast Texas on fire.

As the weeks pass, Ned’s grandchildren, ten-year-old Top and his tomboy cousin Pepper, struggle with personal issues resulting from their traumatic experiences at the Rock Hole only months before. They now find themselves in the middle of a nightmare for which no one can prepare.

Cody and Deputy John Washington, the law south of the tracks, follow a lead from their small community to the long abandoned Cotton Exchange warehouse in Chisum. Stunned, they find the Exchange packed full of the town’s cast off garbage and riddled with booby-trapped passageways and dark burrows. Despite Ned’s warnings, Cody enters the building and finds himself relying on his recent military experiences to save both himself and Big John. Unfortunately, the trail doesn’t end there and the killing spree continues…

This storm swept across seven Northeastern states and left 682 people dead in its wake. Scotti, a novelist, knows how to knit a narrative together that assembles the testimony of dozens of survivors, some of them famous, such as Katharine Hepburn, and some of them otherwise lost to time, like the man who watches as both his children are swept away before him.

Monday, June 25, 2012

I’m reading Wild by Cheryl Strayed and every night my heart is like a crime scene. The memoir recounts a journey in Strayed’s mid 20s when, after her mother died and her marriage disintegrated, she went hiking the Pacific Crest Trail for three months. The goal was to reawaken her soul, which for a long time had been numbed with all the unhealthy substitutes we find for love.

Though the expedition was made out of desperation, it wasn’t carried through that way. Yes, she was physically unprepared and poorly packed — the things she carried in Monster (her massive backpack) would have brought a team of oxen to their knees. Poorly fitting boots made her toenails turn black and fall off. But...[read on]

Before there were blogs, there were journals. And in them we’d write as we really were, not as we wanted to appear. But there comes a day when journals outlive us. And with them, our secrets.

Summer vacation on Great Rock Island was supposed to be a restorative time for Kate, who’d lost her close friend Elizabeth in a sudden accident. But when she inherits a trunk of Elizabeth's journals, they reveal a woman far different than the cheerful wife and mother Kate thought she knew.

The complicated portrait of Elizabeth—her troubled upbringing, and her route to marriage and motherhood—makes Kate question not just their friendship, but her own deepest beliefs about loyalty and honesty at a period of uncertainty in her own marriage.

The more Kate reads, the more she learns the complicated truth of who Elizabeth really was, and rethinks her own choices as a wife, mother, and professional, and the legacy she herself would want to leave behind. When an unfamiliar man’s name appears in the pages, Kate realizes the extent of what she didn’t know about her friend, including where she was really going on the day she died.

Set in the anxious summer after the September 11th attacks, this story of two women—their friendship, their marriages, private ambitions and fears—considers the aspects of ourselves we show and those we conceal, and the repercussions of our choices.

In the slightly fictional British Museum of Natural History, museum curator Billy Harrow is giving a tour of his domain, the climax of which is a giant squid preserved in formalin. But it's been stolen. Billy sets out to recover his prize exhibit, encountering in his investigation a religious sect that worships squids.

There are three major myths of human nature: humans are divided into biological races; humans are naturally aggressive; men and women are truly different in behavior, desires, and wiring. In an engaging and wide-ranging narrative Agustín Fuentes counters these pervasive and pernicious myths about human behavior. Tackling misconceptions about what race, aggression, and sex really mean for humans, Fuentes incorporates an accessible understanding of culture, genetics, and evolution requiring us to dispose of notions of “nature or nurture.” Presenting scientific evidence from diverse fields, including anthropology, biology, and psychology, Fuentes devises a myth-busting toolkit to dismantle persistent fallacies about the validity of biological races, the innateness of aggression and violence, and the nature of monogamy and differences between the sexes. A final chapter plus an appendix provide a set of take-home points on how readers can myth-bust on their own. Accessible, compelling, and original, this book is a rich and nuanced account of how nature, culture, experience, and choice interact to influence human behavior.

By her mid-20s, Edna St Vincent Millay had acquired a reputation as a beauty, a talented, a risqué poet and a shocking flirt. The "It-girl of the hour", as one contemporary described her, began her lifelong fascination with romantic love as a teenager. Unrecognized and unfulfilled, the lonely girl conjured her dream lover with candle and incantation, like some medieval seductress rehearsing her midsummer rites of love. Later, lovers would come in droves, moths attracted to the flame of this alluring redhead. Later still, when already married to a devoted husband, she would fall in love with a much younger man, and celebrate their affair in a cycle of sonnets that unflinchingly describe their unequal passion.

Millay often upset her lovers by what they regarded as her 'masculine' attitude to sex: an ability to flit from lover to lover without commitment. Her poems reveal an honesty about the gulf between sexual desire and love that is as refreshing now as it was scandalous in the early 1920s. When she did fall in love, Millay committed herself with a vengeance, but her poet-self was always present, a canny watcher, pen in hand.

Barnes's books include the novel Finding Caruso and two memoirs, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country—a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize—Hungry for the World, and A Country Called Home.

The bestselling author of The Bolter returns with a delicious novel about two determined women whose lives collide in the halls of a pedigreed London town home.

When eighteen-year-old Grace Carlisle arrives in London in 1914, she’s unable to fulfill her family's ambitions and find a position as an office secretary. Lying to her parents and her brother, Michael, she takes a job as a housemaid at Number 35, Park Lane, where she is quickly caught up in lives of its inhabitants--in particular, those of its privileged son, Edward, and daughter, Beatrice, who has just returned from America after being unceremoniously jilted by her fiancé. Desperate to find a new purpose, Beatrice joins the radical suffragist movement and strikes up an intriguing romance with an impassioned young lawyer. But unbeknownst to both of the young women, the choices they make will connect their chances at future happiness in dramatic and inevitable ways.

Osborne was born in London and studied philosophy and modern languages at Oxford University. Her other books include Lilla’s Feast and The Bolter, a San Francisco Chronicle's Book of the Year and No.1 bestseller in the UK.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Stephen Prothero is a professor in the Department of Religion at Boston University and the author of numerous books, including God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter, the New York Times bestseller Religious Literacy: What Americans Need to Know, and, most recently The American Bible: How Our Words Unite, Divide, and Define a Nation.

When it came to ending Jim Crow, why did black activists succeed and white liberals fail? In a word, religion (or a lack thereof). Other historians have analyzed the civil-rights movement in social and political terms, but David Chappell reads it as "a religious event" in which the fiery rhetoric of the Hebrew prophets inspired civil-rights activists to stand up to police dogs and fire hoses. "A Stone of Hope" is exhaustively researched and brilliantly argued, but what really stands out is Chappell's slashing style, which seeks out on almost every page a new scholar to attack. To take just one provocation, Chappell chastises other civil-rights historians for implying, about Martin Luther King Jr., "that everything King needed to know he learned in kindergarten—his spiritual kindergarten, 'the' black church." King's key intellectual influence was a white man, the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Chappell writes. "What makes King a world-historical figure is his Niebuhrian pessimism about human institutions and his Niebuhrian insistence that coercion is tragically necessary to achieve justice."

A writer is forever learning his or her craft and one of the books I return to again and again for inspiration is Margaret Atwood's Negotiating With The Dead. She explores the reasons why any sane person would devote a lifetime to inventing situations that never happened and characters who never existed. It's a wonderful book, a philosophy of creative writing and what it means to be a writer, and her compilation of provocative quotations from other writers is a...[read on]

Hewed out of a frozen mountain six hundred miles from the North Pole, the Doomsday Seed Vault was designed to safeguard the earth’s precious collection of seeds from rising sea levels, hurtling asteroids, nuclear holocaust, and every other conceivable disaster. But no fortress, however remote or carefully constructed, can protect against human corruption and men who have made it their business to gain control of the world’s food supply.

Dinah Pelerin had no idea when she left sunny Hawaii on an undercover fact-finding mission to the seed vault in Longyearbyen, Norway, that she would get a crash course in the politics of genetic engineering, or that she would become embroiled in the marital troubles of an American presidential candidate and his enigmatic, Norwegian-born wife. Or that a dead body would tumble out of the hotel sauna into her arms.

In late December, Polar Night wraps around the little town of Longyearbyen like a lead blanket, impenetrable and endless. The temperature rarely climbs above zero and bodies don’t decompose in the permafrost. The dead have to be shipped south for burial and soon there are two murder victims headed there. Who has killed them, and why? With three U.S. senators, a powerful corporate CEO, and a Norwegian government minister as her fellow suspects, Dinah is under no illusions. She had better untangle the knot of motives and pretenses fast or suspicion will come crashing downhill like an avalanche and bury her so deep she’ll never see daylight again.

An astonishing transformation over the last 20,000 years has seen our planet changed from a frigid wasteland into the temperate world within which our civilization has grown and thrived. This dynamic episode in our planet's history, right at the close of the Ice Age, saw not only a huge temperature hike but also the Earth's crust bouncing and bending in response to the melting of the great ice sheets and the filling of the ocean basins--dramatic geophysical events that triggered earthquakes, spawned tsunamis, and provoked a series of eruptions from the world's volcanoes. In Waking the Giant, Bill McGuire argues that now that human activities are driving climate change as rapidly as anything seen in post-glacial times, the sleeping giant beneath our feet is stirring once again. When and if it finally wakes, we should all be afraid--very afraid. Could we be leaving our children not only a far hotter world, but a more geologically unstable one too?

Friday, June 22, 2012

This list of ‘Books That Shaped America’ is a starting point. It is not a register of the ‘best’ American books--although many of them fit that description. Rather, the list is intended to spark a national conversation on books written by Americans that have influenced our lives, whether they appear on this initial list or not. We hope people will view the list and then nominate other titles. Finally, we hope people will choose to read and discuss some of the books on this list, reflecting our nation’s unique and extraordinary literary heritage, which the Library of Congress makes available to the world.

One title on the list:

Riders of the Purple Sage

“Riders of the Purple Sage,” Zane Grey’s best-known novel, was originally published in 1912. The Western genre had just evolved from the popular dime novels and penny dreadfuls of the late 19th century. This story of a gun-slinging avenger who saves a young and beautiful woman from marrying against her will played a significant role in shaping the formula of the popular Western genre begun by Owen Wister in “The Virginian” (1904).

Meet Sally Sin. Wife. Mother. Retired Spy. Or so she thinks. After nine years with the USAWMD (United States Agency for Weapons of Mass Destruction)—where she desperately tried to stay one step ahead of her dashing nemesis, Ian Blackford—Sally has become Lucy Hamilton, stay-at-home mom to Theo and wife to adoring husband, Will, who knows nothing of her covert past. But now, instead of chasing bad guys through perilous jungles, she builds giant Lego towers, reads Green Eggs and Ham, and crafts exceptional forts from couch cushions and blankets.

Just when she’s starting to settle into retirement, Sally’s old Agency boss, Simon Still, shows up to recruit her for one more job, involving the illegal arms dealer, Blackford, who is on the move again. Original Sin features Sally’s great chase to thwart Blackford, who, conveniently, no one besides her seems to be able to stop. But can she make it to preschool pickup, get dinner on the table, and foil Blackford’s nefarious plot?

And just when you think the thrills are over, you’ll be ready To Sin Again.

When the Agency Director is taken hostage, Sally is once again called into action. A rescue operation? Easy. That is, until Sally learns of a connection between the kidnapping and her own mysterious childhood, which complicates everything, even Theo’s kindergarten applications. Being a mom is hard enough, without having to save the world.

Funny, fast-paced, and compulsively readable, Spy Mom offers two action-packed adventures for mothers and spies, and anyone who has ever dreamed about being either.

Jack Boughton was the favorite child of his minister-father, the young boy's special grace plain to everyone. And yet from the earliest age, as Marilynne Robinson writes in the novel "Home," Jack insisted on standing apart from his siblings. "There was an aloofness about him," we're told, one that "had enforced a peculiar decorum on them all. No hugging, no roughhousing could include him. Even his father patted his shoulder tentatively, shy and cautious. Why should a child have defended his loneliness that way?" Twenty years after his leaving home in disgrace for fathering a child out of wedlock, Jack returns to his Iowa hometown. Still blessed with his old charisma, but causing suspicion and resentment in neighbors and family friends, he endeavors to repair his relationship with his father and win back the old man's trust. Robinson explores the relationships between Jack, his timid, caring sister, Glory, and their pious father with delicate understanding and unpretentious wisdom. The novel is an ennobling exploration of the way human beings both sustain and injure those they most love.

Jasmine Nights is set in 1942 in Cairo,Turkey, Wales and London. It would make a fabulous movie. But you are rolling your eyes already and saying she would say that, but hear me out, and help me if you can with the casting.

The two principal characters are Saba Tarcan, a half Turkish half English singer who performs for ENSA- (The Entertainment, National Services Association) that sang for the troops. She is fiery, brilliantly talented, a rebel. I need someone tough and tender for her, who also looks a little exotic.

My dream girl for this is a new discovery: Katharine McPhee from Smash, would be perfect, in fact writing this has inspired me to send the book to her. She has a fabulous voice, has the kind of in your face charisma I need, and also high cheekbones- she could easily look like a half Turkish girl. My other candidate would be...[read on]

This book is a history of the civil liberties records of American presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama. It examines the full range of civil liberties issues: First Amendment rights of freedom of speech, press, and assembly; due process; equal protection, including racial justice, women's rights, and lesbian and gay rights; privacy rights, including reproductive freedom; and national security issues. The book argues that presidents have not protected or advanced civil liberties, and that several have perpetrated some of worst violations. Some Democratic presidents (Wilson and Roosevelt), moreover, have violated civil liberties as badly as some Republican presidents (Nixon and Bush). This is the first book to examine the full civil liberties records of each president (thus, placing a president's record on civil rights with his record on national security issues), and also to compare the performance on particular issues of all the presidents covered.

Take [director Steve McQueen's 2011 film] Shame, add Huey Lewis and a chainsaw, and you’ve got Bret Easton Ellis’s seminal 1991 novel and its eventual film adaptation. The sight of a severed head fails to make Patrick Bateman blink, but a glimpse of a rival’s business card – a thing of “subtle off-white” beauty boasting “tasteful thickness” and a flawless watermark – makes him instantly feverish. Is he a lone psychopath, or the inevitable product of a company which cares more about its stationery supplies than its people? Meat cleavers, nail guns, axes, knives… Bateman’s main creative outlet is his choice of weapon.

As part of my research for In the Kingdom of Men, for the past five years, I’ve been reading nothing but novels, memoirs, scholarly texts, and articles about Saudi Arabia and the Arabian American Oil Company. Now, I’ve settled into three very different books, all nonfiction.

The first is Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. It’s not your usual food memoir but a memoir that happens to involve food. I’m reading it for the rich detail, vivid imagery, and emotional honesty that I’m delighted to find in any good memoir. It has a real literary...[read on]

Here is the first thing you need to know about me: I’m a barefoot girl from red-dirt Oklahoma, and all the marble floors in the world will never change that.

Here is the second thing: that young woman they pulled from the Arabian shore, her hair tangled with mangrove—my husband didn’t kill her, not the way they say he did.

1967. Gin Mitchell knows a better life awaits her when she marries hometown hero Mason McPhee. Raised in a two-room shack by her Oklahoma grandfather, a strict Methodist minister, Gin never believed that someone like Mason, a handsome college boy, the pride of Shawnee, would look her way. And nothing can prepare her for the world she and Mason step into when he takes a job with the Arabian American Oil company in Saudi Arabia. In the gated compound of Abqaiq, Gin and Mason are given a home with marble floors, a houseboy to cook their meals, and a gardener to tend the sandy patch out back. Even among the veiled women and strict laws of shariah, Gin’s life has become the stuff of fairy tales. She buys her first swimsuit, she pierces her ears, and Mason gives her a glittering diamond ring. But when a young Bedouin woman is found dead, washed up on the shores of the Persian Gulf, Gin’s world closes in around her, and the one person she trusts is nowhere to be found.

Set against the gorgeously etched landscape of a country on the cusp of enormous change, In the Kingdom of Men abounds with sandstorms and locust swarms, shrimp peddlers, pearl divers, and Bedouin caravans—a luminous portrait of life in the desert. Award-winning author Kim Barnes weaves a mesmerizing, richly imagined tale of Americans out of their depth in Saudi Arabia, a marriage in peril, and one woman’s quest for the truth, no matter what it might cost her.

Barnes's books include the novel Finding Caruso and two memoirs, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country—a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize—Hungry for the World, and A Country Called Home.

Weaving national narratives from stories of the daily lives and familiar places of local residents, Françoise Hamlin chronicles the slow struggle for black freedom through the history of Clarksdale, Mississippi. Hamlin paints a full picture of the town over fifty years, recognizing the accomplishments of its diverse African American community and strong NAACP branch, and examining the extreme brutality of entrenched power there. The Clarksdale story defies triumphant narratives of dramatic change, and presents instead a layered, contentious, untidy, and often disappointingly unresolved civil rights movement.

Following the black freedom struggle in Clarksdale from World War II through the first decade of the twenty-first century allows Hamlin to tell multiple, interwoven stories about the town's people, their choices, and the extent of political change. She shows how members of civil rights organizations--especially local leaders Vera Pigee and Aaron Henry--worked to challenge Jim Crow through fights against inequality, police brutality, segregation, and, later, economic injustice. With Clarksdale still at a crossroads today, Hamlin explores how to evaluate success when poverty and inequality persist.

If my books were ever turned into movies, and I actually got some say who to cast, I would pick total unknowns. I have two reasons for this. The first is that when I go see a movie with a really well-known star in it, all I can think is, "Oh. That's so-and-so in Spandex. Isn't she dating the lead guitarist from that band?". It's totally selfish of me, but if my characters ever found their way to the big screen, I'd want the opposite. Years later, I'd want people to see the actress and think, "Oh. That's Helen Hamilton". (my main character) I guess what I'm saying is that I'd want to totally ruin a young actor's life. Evil, but true.

The second motivation for me to choose unknowns is that I've noticed that when a book gets turned into a movie, especially in the YA genre for some strange reason, most the original fans of the book go bananas and openly protest the choices for the male and female lead. Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart sent a lot of the fans of the book into fits. Then there's what happened to...[read on]

Crissa Stone is a career criminal who has pulled a number of impressive heists by knowing how to keep her mouth shut and her temper in check. Still, as good as she is, she wants to get out of the life. All she needs is one last big score, enough to bribe her lover’s way out on parole, set up a safe and stable new life, and get her daughter back. However, things keep going wrong, like when her last two partners lost their cool and fought over the take instead of walking away $150K richer. The mess they made of the job and each other has put her on the run again.

She’s not the only one. Benny Roth, a former mobster, has been straight for years, but now he has his own problems. A face from the past has popped up to tell him that boss Joey Dio is finally dead and to ask about the five million dollars that Joey was rumored to have stashed away years ago. Benny denies knowing anything about it and claims he’s out of the business. That may be what he says, but he’s willing to risk almost everything for one last shot.

With the law and mobsters on the lookout and five million dollars on the line, it isn’t long before Crissa and Benny find themselves on a collision course that neither of them can avoid. This hard-boiled world, where the stakes---and the risks---are always high, unfolds at breakneck speed in Kings of Midnight, another dark and thrilling masterwork of crime fiction from Wallace Stroby.

It is not unusual today for presidents to appeal for public support in the face of an intransigent Congress. Jeffrey Tulis explains the ways in which such efforts have provoked resentment in Congress and even helped to end careers. President Andrew Johnson -- an extreme example of the bull-in-a-china-shop approach -- used the occasion of his speech to a rowdy crowd in St. Louis in 1866 to taunt the most prominent leaders of his own party. "If I have played the Judas, who has been my Christ that I have played the Judas with?" Johnson asked, naming a handful of congressmen who "compare themselves with the Savior." It is not surprising, then, that the 10th article of impeachment against Andrew Johnson concerned his intemperate, inflammatory and scandalous harangues against Congress, all made, as the article of impeachment claims, "with a loud voice." With "The Rhetorical Presidency," Tulis offers a fascinating compendium of lore on the multiple perils and occasional promises of presidential persuasion.